This is a fun article, but one thing casually mentioned in the beginning stuck out to me:
However, when playing competitions at a high level, you need to keep track of a lot of information. What cards do people have in their hands? What dice numbers have not been rolled much?
I don’t really play Catan so there might be some context needed, but that last sentence sounds like Gambler’s Fallacy. Is there something I’m missing?
In Catan, each resource-bearing tile is allocated a number. When that number is rolled, everyone with access to that tile gets the resource.
If you’re halfway through a game and there have been very few sixes rolled, that could imply that there’s a genuine shortage of some resource (as distinct from a shortage due to other players hoarding), which has implications for what kind of trades you’re likely to be able to pull off.
My memory of the Catan rules is hazy but shouldn’t it be possible to just store every possible option when something invisible happens? There is very little information to store per player and there shouldn’t be that much branching because invisible actions are rare.
Yeah, the entire possibility state would not take much ram; even if it did, when new evidence arises you could trim the state space to eliminate incompatible ones.
This is a fun article, but one thing casually mentioned in the beginning stuck out to me:
I don’t really play Catan so there might be some context needed, but that last sentence sounds like Gambler’s Fallacy. Is there something I’m missing?
In Catan, each resource-bearing tile is allocated a number. When that number is rolled, everyone with access to that tile gets the resource.
If you’re halfway through a game and there have been very few sixes rolled, that could imply that there’s a genuine shortage of some resource (as distinct from a shortage due to other players hoarding), which has implications for what kind of trades you’re likely to be able to pull off.
Makes sense, thanks for the information!
When I first read it, I thought it was meant as a joke.
But now that you point it out, I realize I might have jumped to conclusions, and he might be serious.
My memory of the Catan rules is hazy but shouldn’t it be possible to just store every possible option when something invisible happens? There is very little information to store per player and there shouldn’t be that much branching because invisible actions are rare.
He’s essentially doing that, but in a compressed form that makes it easy to trim invalid states.
Yeah, the entire possibility state would not take much ram; even if it did, when new evidence arises you could trim the state space to eliminate incompatible ones.
I wouldn’t call that computer science knowledge though, more like “coding + logic”.
Dream? Is that you?